PD Newsletter #102: Opportunities for transformation in local public services

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

We've just published our 2025 year note reflecting on PD's highlights this year: from surpassing the 100 employee mark to receiving a High Commendation in the Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards. Watch it in video form below.

We'd like to say thank you to our newsletter readers for being part of our 2025, and wish you a happy new year!

Jack and Rosemary

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Supporting clients through 2025’s challenges

This year we’ve worked with dozens of organisations around the world to tackle their biggest challenges. These themes stood out to us:

🦾 Harnessing AI

Back in January, our piece on the UK Government’s plans for AI and our newsletter on the same subject argued that AI is no silver bullet. Realising the value of AI depends on its integration within “adaptable, user-centered systems that prioritise experimentation and learning”. That principle has guided our work with clients, from supporting a financial regulator to use AI to reduce manual admin and support risk identification, to helping the Government of Nova Scotia co-develop their AI Adoption Playbook.

⚡ Building cyber and tech resilience

Our new book Shaping Technology for Transformation describes technological resilience as an “organisational capability that grows out of the conditions created by leadership”. Against a backdrop of increasing numbers of cyber attacks this year, we supported the leadership of a major UK retailer to manage the immediate aftermath of an attack, and partnered with the Local Government Association to develop and launch a Cyber Incident Grab Bag for England’s local authorities.

🔄 Public service reform

In late 2024, we saw calls for new ways of working in the UK Government. We’re proud to have been part of building that movement for change in 2025, working as the Cabinet Office’s strategic partner for the £100m Test, Learn & Grow programme. We’ve also worked with HMRC to further their five-year transformation agenda, and with GovTech Barbados to pursue a whole-of-government approach to digital transformation.

🗓️ Public Digital in 2026

• Join us for PD Day: A blueprint for a future-ready state, on Tuesday 20 January in partnership with FWD50. Join Mike Bracken CBE, Natasha Clarke and a range of other practitioners to explore why digital sovereignty matters and what it looks like in practice. Register to attend.
  
  
• We’re sponsoring UKGovCamp on Saturday 17 January in Birmingham. We hope to see you there!

Internet era ways of working

🍰 “We created a gâteau of false certainty, and we ended up eating it for two years.” In his piece published this week in Tech Monitor, Tom Loosemore explains why your operating model is your organisation's biggest risk.

👀 Iain Montgomery on what gets in the way of innovation, and what a real innovation team needs: people who can spot things that the rest of the organisation is blind to.

🌾 “Change works best when it's designed with the grain of the organisation, not against it”. Jess Ferguson breaks down some approaches to delivering transformation in decentralised systems, where no single organisation can simply ‘roll out’ transformation.

🤼 A guide to writing better prompts for LLMs using the Kayfabe model from Jack Sheppard.

🌐 How to be strategic in multilingual design, according to Leilani Martínez. The process of adapting services for other languages is often seen as a simple translation task, but to create an effective service you need strategy - and a user-centred approach. Plus, good stuff in the top 50 content design resources of 2025, collated by UX Content Collective.

Technology in focus

📱The world is watching as Australia’s social media ban for under 16s takes effect. Young people are already seeking out alternative apps, raising concerns about the risk of the policy becoming a game of 'whack-a-mole' between government and teens. France may be the next country to try an Australia-style ban.

🌀 Interesting read from Aestora on why AI is irrational. Exploring the disconnect between modern AI and established principles of reason, it also draws out the difference between the now synonymously used terms AI and machine learning: “AI is the pursuit of certainty. Machine learning is the pursuit of best guesses.”

🍱 Smart work from social data scientist Lauren Leek on how Google Maps quietly redistributes economic survival across London’s restaurants, and her work building a machine-learning model to predict what a restaurant’s Google rating should be.

😏 Microsoft has reduced its targets for selling agentic AI after failing to meet its sales quotas. This may be down to the market preference for ChatGPT, as well as a lack of trust in agentic AI. If you are a Copilot fan, Microsoft’s benchmarking tools mean you can monitor which of your employees are ‘embracing AI’, and fire the ones that aren’t.

🥀 A powerful essay by Michael Geoffrey Asia on the experiences of data workers who train AI companions by providing fake intimacy to users. Calling for ethical guidelines around this kind of work, it offers a window into the hidden labour in the AI supply chain: “We were teaching machines how to mimic intimacy, how to exploit loneliness, how to sound human while remaining utterly hollow.”

Digital government news

🛣️ “Development builds things. Design builds connections.” Amoge Ndukwe on the problem with Nigeria’s approach to public infrastructure projects, and the gap between development and design: “It’s the difference between focusing on “buses” or “roads” as individual projects, and focusing on mobility as a living system with people, technology, policy, environment, and maintenance all connected.”

⚙️ Related wisdom in Rainer Kattel’s piece on what governance must look like when change happens through system transformation. Provides an expert summary of governments as distributed capability systems, and the new capabilities needed to make change happen: “sensing rather than commanding; convening rather than controlling; delivering with empowerment.”

📒 Introducing a procurement playbook for new mayors, developed by Partners for Public Good in collaboration with Bloomberg Philanthropies.

🏗️ David Eaves on why the path to digital sovereignty is via a commodified tech stack: “building the capacity to become market shapers and not market takers — thinking like electricity grids and railway gauges, not digital empires.” You can hear from David at our virtual FWD50 event on 20 January.

🚰 Sovereignty is a major focus in the Netherlands’ National AI Plan, which also makes connections between building infrastructure for AI leadership and developing physical infrastructure, like the country’s Delta water planning.

Some fun things

🔌 In case another Cloudflare outage takes down DownDetector, there is now a DownDetector for DownDetector.

🎄 Our Network Member (and former PD newsletter editor) Amy McNichol curates a wonderful collection of 24 anonymous essays in December - one for every day of advent.